Why You Should Start A Business While You're Still In College

Tensions ran high as eight college kids mentally rehearsed their
pitches before it was their turn to present to a group of judges
at South By Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas.

The students were competing in SXSW's third annual Student
Startup Madness competition. The event, set up like the March
Madness basketball tournament, had whittled down a list of
hundreds of collegiate companies through regional competitions
until only the top eight remained. Those companies came to
Austin.

"They all looked like deer in
headlights when we first got there," Sean Branagan, creator of
the event, told Business Insider. "On stage, they all did
amazing."

Branagan, director of the
Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Syracuse
University's Newhouse School, started the Student Startup Madness
program to highlight outstanding university entrepreneurship
programs and encourage college students to start
businesses.

Why?

"College kids should be starting companies because they have less
to lose," he says. "They're scrappy, and can live on a
couch, and eat ramen noodles, which is what a lot of these
startup founders have to do. Even if a company fails, the kids
got that experience. College is a great time to take that
risk."

The panel of judges — which included Brian Cohen of New York
Angels and Sandy Khaund of Turner Broadcasting — judged the
students' companies on the potential size of the market
addressed, the strength of the team, and the traction the company
already has. The three winning companies – Find My Song, an
online collaborative music platform; StylePuzzle, an
app for picking out outfits based on the user's clothing; and
Notefuly, a
note-taking app — each recieved $50,000 of credits for Google's
cloud platform. All three company CEOs told Business Insider that
pitching onstage in front of judges at one of the biggest tech
hubs of the year was an amazing experience.

Find My Song CEO Vince Fong told Business Insider via email
that the competition taught him how to think through all the
potential weaknesses of a product so that you're more ready to
address people challenging the business model.

"The biggest impact will come from the connections we made
while being here," Taseen Peterson, co-founder of Notefuly,
told Business Insider via email. "It's all about the
intangibles."